“I love stealing, I love taking things!”
Good news everyone: Futurama is back!
Well, sort of. It’s only back if you’re American, so yet again I have had to resort to (ahem) unofficial distribution channels in order to obtain a copy of a movie that doesn’t even have a UK release date yet. I hasten to add that once Fox remember that there are a load of Futurama fans beyond the borders of the United States, I will gladly, gleefully even, cough up for a legal copy: it’s really good.
Of course, I could have bought the DVD from a US retailer in order to watch it more-or-less legitimately, only I would have had to wait for at least two weeks for the disk to arrive, and even then I couldn’t just watch the thing. Because I don’t have a normal DVD player, I’d have to rip all nine-billion or so bytes of the DVD to my hard drive using a bizarre Frankensteinian combination of a USB-ATA adapter, an old PC DVD drive, and the excellent Mac The Ripper program in order to watch that region 1 DVD on my region 2 MacBook Pro. That’s because Steve Jobs has deemed Apple users undeserving of the region-free flexibility now enjoyed by every other platform, even dopey old Windows, and has almost completely locked down his machines against such iniquitous activities as watching Avatar DVDs in Britain. Note that ‘almost’: the stubbornness of nerds will always, always overcome the stupidity of suits. Indeed, all the obstacles put in place to prevent piracy across regions are nothing more than counterproductive irritations, and simply create a greater demand for pirated copies because they’re so much easier to obtain and watch than legitimate ones. I bet there are a fair few people out there who, being less stubborn or less geeky than me, have just not bought DVDs that they otherwise would have, because they can’t be bothered to jump through such a ridiculous set of hoops.
I just wish the people in charge of distributing digital things I want to buy would realise that and spend their time and money on making films and shows easily available to everyone (at a fair price, of couse), rather than wasting all that energy on futile attempts to stop people having fun just because they happen to live in the wrong place, forcing otherwise law-abiding people to embark on daring Benderesque criminal careers in order to watch a cartoon.
Tom Ryan says:
For the record, I just bought the UK release of Bender’s Big Score, which finally went on sale on the sensible side of the Atlantic this April.
2008-05-23 20:07